Chapter 3

Back at the cave, we unloaded the wagon and let Linda graze while I went through the armory, trying to figure out what kind of firepower I should carry in the field. I discussed the matter with Eve, and we decided on an RPG for now. However, it looked like we needed to consider what we could make of local materials that would replace the RPG, since we only had 6 of the rockets.

It looked to me like we needed something that could be fired from the crossbow, but had an explosive warhead. No question about it, we had to find the makings of gunpowder as soon as possible. I could cobble up a fuse if we had the gunpowder to go with it. We need saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, and sulfur is going to be the hard one to find. Well, that scare today was enough to make me look real hard for sulfur.

We still had several hours of daylight left, so I took advantage of the light to start work on the new front door. I cut several vertical studs to press-fit into the opening and nailed planks onto the studs in shiplap fashion. I managed to finish one side and start the other side before Eve called me for supper. After supper, I finished up the wall and started on the doors. The doors were built in board-and-batten style and I had them finished, but not hung, before bedtime.

The next morning, Eve helped me to hang the doors using hinges that had been included in the stuff we brought with us. The closure was a simple bar I dropped into supports on the door and the new walls. Once the basic construction was done, I used some steel spikes I had to anchor the walls to the roof and floor of the cave. That wood was so tough, I figured that it would take one of those elephants to break in.

Eve said that she was getting sick of nothing but meat for meals, and she wanted to search for some tubers and greens that we might eat. We had a very good automatic testing lab that could find anything harmful to us in our food, so she wanted to gather some representative samples and test them for safety. I certainly agreed with the idea, but I insisted that we never go anywhere alone until we knew much more about our neighborhood. Lucy was not enough protection, I was going along to cover her with the RPG.

We hitched Linda to the wagon and went out prospecting for food and anything else useful that we could find. We headed down off the mountain, since we wanted to see what the valley was like. We made our way down the trail with surprisingly little difficulty. There was only one place where I had to do some shoveling to clear the road wide enough for the wagon. We were lucky that the trail was not so steep that Linda was going to have any trouble pulling the loaded wagon back up the hill.

We had hardly reached the valley when Eve had us stop while she looked at some leafy plants and something that looked like grain stalks. She collected samples of both and we continued on. We stopped five more times for her to collect leaves and fruit. She also dug a couple of times and came up with possible substitutes for potatoes. She found another possible cereal before she was ready to return home.

She started the test machine as soon as we got home, and we had a couple of prospects ready for taste test by supper time. One of the leafy plants was a possible substitute for lettuce and tasted pretty good. Nobody would ever mistake the taste for lettuce, but the texture and taste were close enough that we could get used to it. Damned if the small fruit wasn't the spitting image of a tomato! All we needed was a grain that would let us make bread, and we would be able to make BLTs.

Two of the other leafy plants turned out to have too much mercury to be safe, and that raised the question of where the hell the mercury was coming from. Both grains were OK, but one tasted like hot pepper, so we weren't going to make bread from it, but it looked like a potential spice. Another safe fruit tasted terrible, I almost said, "tasted like shit," but I have never tasted shit, so I don't know how accurate that might be. Anyway, its flavor suggested a high sulfur content, so my interest was raised by that. Both tubers were safe, so she was planning to have boiled "potatoes" tomorrow night.

I wanted to take a trip on the other side of the waterfall. We had never gone more than a few meters beyond the falls, so that was terra incognita for us. Eve agreed to go with me tomorrow morning after breakfast, so that was what we planned. Unfortunately, we didn't make it because it rained. Actually, I had never before seen such a rain storm! The wind blew toward our cave, so I was glad that we had the new door and wall installed; otherwise, rain and water from the falls would have blown in on us. All of our stuff had been hauled inside the cave by now, so there was nothing that could be harmed by the rain.

I was too impatient to sit still, so I wanted to explore the part of the cave leading off from the kitchen. Eve and I put on our spelunking kit and started out. I had rigged up a string of lights, sort of like Christmas tree lights, from our LEDs so that we could have light as we explored and a guide to bring us safely home.

We walked out 500 meters before we ran out of wire. There was nothing worthy of note in the cavern, but I thought it was interesting that the floor was reasonably flat and unbroken. When we came to the end of the string of lights, I walked a few meters farther and came to a ledge that dropped about three or four meters nearly straight down to a rough and badly twisted floor. Off in the distance, I could see a bit of light, so I knew that we had a back door if we ever really needed it. Somehow, I felt a bit relieved by this knowledge.

We went back, gathering the lights and the wire as we went, and started through the other doorway. We strung out the lights as we had done before and found a series of caverns, some larger and some smaller than the ones we were occupying, but, other than finding another stream, there was nothing special about these chambers. Oh, well, at least we were not bored while we were trapped by the rain storm.

I put the lights back into storage and looked around for something else to do. Seeing how restless I was, Eve suggested that I see if I could convert the stream in our bedroom into a shower and/or a bathtub. Now, there was a practical suggestion, so I got right on it.

The stream came out of the hole in the wall about one meter off the floor and splashed into a pool about 15 centimeters deep. The pool ran through a trench in the floor for nearly three meters before plunging down a hole of considerable depth. We had been using the hole as an indoor toilet, and there had been no odor problem, so we assumed that the hole was very deep.

We had some thick plastic film, about one millimeter thick, that I could use to line a tub if I could work out how to build it. I finally decided that I could cut some wood planks and build something like an old horse trough (watering trough) and line that with plastic. I just needed to figure out how to make a drain.

The final problem was that this was going to be a bath in cold water unless one of us had a brainstorm, but I figured on worrying about that later.

We were able to determine that we had arrived in early spring, so there was still time to plant a crop of at least some of our vegetables, possibly all of them, if I could find enough space. We really wanted to get a stand of corn in and some peas and beans. Tomatoes were next on the list, but I had to get busy. I was not an experienced farmer, but the CDs and DVDs we had for reference should tell me the basics, and I could just learn the rest the hard way.